The counterculture strikes back at London’s rough-and-ready Cockpit theatre as Daisy Campbell, daughter of the late, great Ken Campbell, directs the four-hour, three-act, sex, drugs and psycho-drama she has written based on Cosmic Trigger, the bizarre autobiography of Robert Anton Wilson.

Wilson dedicated the book to Campbell senior, who had staged Wilson and Robert Shea’s sci-fi trilogy Illuminatus! in Liverpool in November 1976. That unforgettable nine-hour epic on a shoestring seemed to happen only because Campbell was willing it into life from the sidelines. The cast included Prunella Gee, who played both Mavis the guerrilla and Eris, goddess of chaos and discord. She began a relationship with Campbell, resulting in the birth of Daisy. Now, Daisy’s 17-year-old daughter, Dixie McDevitt, plays Wilson’s daughter, Luna, who was killed in a 1976 robbery that went wrong in the San Francisco bakery where she worked after school.

Cosmic Trigger movingly becomes the story of how Bob Wilson – he and Shea were known as “the two Bobs” – copes with this tragedy in the alternative world he inhabited of conspiracy theory, hallucinogenic drugs, synchronicity and sinister ritual. Like Campbell, Wilson regarded the world of the illuminati semi-seriously as material for both art and speculation. In Cosmic Trigger, the actor Oliver Senton as Wilson brilliantly projects the even more radical idea that the gods and gurus he has lived by all along are insufficient to the cause of human happiness.

‘LSD can bring about psychotic behaviour in those who have not taken it,’ … a scene from Cosmic Trigger. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Indeed, it turns out the shamans are sham. “LSD can bring about psychotic behaviour in those who have not taken it,” is one of many striking lines in the play, this one uttered by Jethro Skinner as the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, prime advocate of LSD and coiner of the catchphrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Other words of wacky wisdom are provided by Bob Shea (Tom Baker) as he and the other Bob are inducted in the League of Dynamic Discord with its motto of “liberation through paranoia”; and by Lee Ravitz as wild man Kerry Thornley who was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald by what one US prosecutor described in court as “the most fantastic chain of coincidences ever”.

The assassination of JFK was the cosmic trigger for the notion, as far as the two Bobs were concerned, that the illuminati were responsible for every conspiracy theory going. There’s a wonderful moment in the new play when their fictional representation of the discordian anarchist Hagbard Celine (also played by Skinner) bursts on to the poop of his yellow submarine on a mock-up of the rickety stage at the Science Fiction theatre of Liverpool in Mathew Street, right next to the old Beatles haunt, the Cavern, where Illuminatus! premiered.

Cosmic Trigger is in part an echo chamber of what Brian Aldiss, the sci-fi novelist and Campbell enthusiast, described as “a long strip-cartoon of every possible 20th-century phobia, something Bertrand Russell and Genghis Khan might have cooked up while sitting down to write Monty Python”. Peter Hall had rejected Campbell’s invitation to come and play God in the show for three minutes but he loved Illuminatus! and invited it, and Campbell’s company – which included Gee, Chris Langham, David Rappaport, Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy – to open the National Theatre’s Cottesloe auditorium in March 1977; the recorded voice of a speaking computer was that of John Gielgud.

The importance of the pentad was honoured in the Illuminatus! construction of five plays, each written in five segments designed to run for 23 minutes each. Actors in Cosmic Trigger are summoned to the stage on their 23-minute call, the show ending – after suggesting that Bob Wilson be remembered alongside James Joyce and Aldous Huxley as one of the great exponents of realigned, or redefined, fiction – in a shower of $23 bills. Just as I sat with Brian Aldiss through Illuminatus! so I sat with Prunella Gee through Cosmic Trigger, relishing what now seems to be a theatrical and cultural message in a bottle from another planet. Or is it? Suddenly fake news is all the rage, and what exactly were the Russians up to in the American and French presidential elections? I feel a sudden fit of paranoia coming on. Pass me a tab of acid, man.